“The House Isn’t Real. You’re Dead”
That was my first thought when I was reading Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of The Hill House. From the beginning, signs that the main character Eleanor or Nelly was passing from reality to the afterlife/reincarnation kept popping up. Almost weed-like connections to another book, humanity’s forbidden book.
pc: JOlene osztian
That book is the Tibetan Book of the Dead. For simplicity, only certain parts of the book will be used to explain the house. The actual name of the book Bardo Thodol can be translated as “in-between state and awakening”. The most relevant idea from the book of the dead is what happens to the person after death. At first, the person is considered in the in-between world, and in this stage as we’ll call it is where the person is dead by do not know that they are dead. It is also where the Buddhistic deities manifest, and because most people are unfamiliar with them, I will refer to Carl Jung’s archetypes instead. In the third stage and final stage, the person starts to see karmic illusions and things start to take a dark turn, in which awakening is usually reached.
pc: JOlene osztian
On the way to the house, Eleanor sees relative to herself perfect houses she could settle down and live in. This is the point in the story when Eleanor is going to the in-between place or a terminal to the afterlife. That in-between place, in this case, is the hillside house itself. When she arrives, she is the first of all the guests to arrive, It’s possible that Mrs. Dudley can be thought of as part of the house itself, in the sense she is a clock. Notice how she never says anything more. Nor is she ever seen actually leaving the house or arriving. In the second stage, all of the objects are things from her past life. Eleanor was at the house far long ago in her childhood, so even the house is from her past life. The other guests arriving is the manifestation of the deities or the archetypes.The doctor is Jung’s archetype of the wise old man. Notice how only the doctor seems to know about the house and its past, and that he serves as a guide to the other in the story? Luke is the archetype of the animus, the masculine part of Eleanor’s psyche. Theodora is perhaps the easiest to see, Theodora is Eleanor’s shadow or the archetype of the shadow.
When Eleanor starts transitioning to the final stage is when the house or in-between starts to do its spooky acts and illusions. When she starts seeing her karmic illusions is when the house fully turns “haunted” and this is also when the other guests in some sense turn against Eleanor and start to reject her “childish” acts and behaviour. It is easy to see when the final stage begins because everyone starts referring to Eleanor as Nelly, as does the house itself. Depending on how a person deals with these karmic illusions will influence what kind of life they will be reincarnated as. Because Nelly fails to let go, in other words, does not come to acceptance with impermanence, she ends up leaving the in-between in a horrible manner. She ends up crashing into a tree, after not allowing herself to let go of the house. However, then the question remains, when in the beginning of the book did, she actually die?